“Seize the Day!”
By John Counsel
The Freedom™ Personal Control System was created in 1989-1990 to help me regain control of my life following a disastrous mid-life crisis that lasted from 1985 to 1990, when I lost control of my life on almost every level. Nothing else I tried worked for me and by mid-1988 I realised that, if I wanted to survive, I needed to create my own solution.
The Problem
I was an undiagnosed Aspie at the time, with education, qualifications and almost two decades of professional experience in education, psychology and design and an IQ in the top 3%. I was 40 when it began and 45 by the time I clawed my way back to some semblance of recovery. I was married with four children, and everything in my life was at serious risk of either failing or being lost.
False Starts
I entered a one-year program of psychotherapy after I was found to have more than two-and-a-half times the supposedly lethal limit of stress, only to last just two sessions before all the psychosomatic symptoms I’d endured over the previous two years began to return, all at the same time, and I was incapable of continuing.
It would be another twelve years before I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome — and achieve full recovery.
At the time, though, in late 1987, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I had to find my own cure… and I set about doing so.
A Personal Reboot
The Aspie genius, Albert Einstein, once stated that “all truth is revealed”. In other words, all truth exists in its own sphere and we discover it — or it reveals itself to us —when the time is right.
I agree with him. My own life experience has continually confirmed and consolidated this conviction.
To make a long story shorter, we made the decision to relocate to Melbourne (our third move in eighteen months after losing our home in 1985) so our older children could complete their secondary school education at the elite, single-sex high schools where Lynne and I attended and had first met — Marnie at MacRobertson Girls High School and Josh at Melbourne High School.
An old friend gave me a Debden DayRunner® planner/organiser soon after we moved and it proved to be a seminal event in my recovery. It frustrated me after a few weeks and I began looking at alternatives. Eventually, though, they also frustrated me and it became obvious to me, as a designer, that none of them offered what I needed, so it became necessary to create a solution of my own that did.
Recognition and Acceptance
By the middle of 1990 I’d completed my new system and in early 1991 it hit the Australian market. It was an instant success. Companies began to recognise that the system and its support training offered multiple advantages over older planner and organiser systems (which all predated World War II).
Those benefits included significantly higher productivity for users, measurably less stress, less illness and absenteeism, higher self-confidence and self-esteem and measurable improvements in corporate culture, more earning power and more free time for independent professionals, tradespeople and entrepreneurs, especially in small businesses.
Of the seven recognised opinion leaders in the field, six chose my system for their personal use and the seventh — who was contracted to the largest manufacturer — informed me privately that, as soon as his current contract expired, he’d be switching to my system. The Time Management Letter, the Asia-Pacific’s leading business and professional newsletter at the time, devoted two entire issues to my system.
And Catastrophe…
Then disaster struck. (What’s new, right?)
The consortium of business owners that had been formed to manufacture and market my system nationally, had a monumental falling out over unrelated issues and I found myself with rapidly-growing demand — and no supplies!
An Aspie Quirk
Remember me mentioning that I was an undiagnosed Aspie at this time?
I was so much more in control of my life at this point that I refused to become stressed over this dilemma. Not only that, but I noticed another new development that really troubled me… system users were becoming desperate about the prospect of not being able to enjoy continuity of supply of the monthly refills.
This disturbed me because I’d designed the system to prevent users from becoming emotionally dependent on it. I was emotionally independent of it, having used it to regain control of every aspect of my life by this time, so I made the decision to take the system off the market while I worked to find the reasons why this had happened.
Like I said, I was an undiagnosed Aspie. This was an objective, rational personal decision, powered by Aspie altruism… not a marketing decision driven by the desire to maximise profit.
Within a few months of reflection, exploration and determination to make any necessary changes that would make the system safer, easier, better and faster for users, I had made several major design changes.
My Aspie World 